Abstract
The Three-Body Trilogy, published in English, is arguably the best-selling Chinese literature, with the most attention garnered from the English-language media. Literature is viewed as a symbolic product, as a nation’s literary works are naturally seen as a literary prestige or reserving the status of a sacred classic. While some literary fields are considered dominant, others ending up in being dominated. Thus, the conflict between the dominant and dominated in the field of literature serves as the field’s fundamental driving force. Such competition may derive from political influence, financial gain, social standing, or even the cultural standing of the field the participants occupy. By adopting the keyword “The Three-Body Trilogy,” this study searched the BCC and NOW corpora. It was found that the Classic China International Publishing Project, Silk Road Literary Project, Ken Liu, Tor Books all provided varying degrees of support for the translation and dissemination of The Three-Body Trilogy, which jointly form the field and translation context for it to move from the dominated literary field to the dominant literary field.
Plain Language Summary
The Three-Body Trilogy is arguably the best-selling Chinese literature, with the most attention garnered from the English-language media. By using the keyword “The Three-Body Trilogy”, this study searched the BCC and NOW corpora. It was found that the Classic China International Publishing Project, Silk Road Literary Project, Ken Liu, Tor Books all provided varying degrees of support for its translation and dissemination, which jointly form the field and translation context for it to move from the dominated literary field to the dominant literary field. The findings demonstrate that, in the hierarchical world literary field, translation is no longer just a straightforward translation between texts but rather a significant medium for the dissemination of world literature within the boundaries of power. Based on the research presented in this study, it is challenging to promote a nation’s books abroad using only the internal competition mechanism of the book rights trade market when the nation’s language and culture are still not well-positioned. In turn, enforcing the external influence of government funding for translation and publication can shorten the translation and publication production cycle, which in turn permits dominated language books to emerge in the dominant language book market. A drawback of this study is that it only considers The Three-Body Trilogy in English and pays scant attention to habitus and capital. Further research may: (a) explore the translator’s habitus with the help of paratext, and (b) analyse the capital feedback of the participants entailing the translation’s success.
Introduction
The Three-Body Trilogy, written by Cixin Liu, consisting of The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End, is the most widely read piece of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world, among both readers and the media (Deng & Goh, 2022, p. 186). It tells the story of information exchange, the life-or-death struggle between human and the three-body civilization, as well as the rise and fall of the two civilizations in the universe. In August 2015, English version of volume 1 of The Three-Body Trilogy won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, promoting Cixin Liu as the first Asian writer who won this top honor for Sci-fi. The Three-Body Trilogy is ambitious and far-reaching, exploring human nature through Sci-fi while combining science and humanity. Also, it was praised by Chinese literary critic Feng Yan for elevating Chinese Sci-fi to a world-class level (C. X. Liu, 2016). Former US President Barack Obama included The Three-Body Trilogy on his list of recommended books and joked that his usual disagreements with Congress were insignificant in comparison to the content of the book (Michiko, 2017). At Netflix, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (creators of Game of Thrones) were working on a TV adaptation of The Three-Body Trilogy. Production began on November 8, 2021, and the series is set to premiere on March 21, 2024.
Bourdieu’s Theory of Field
Translation is a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural activity in which there are not only power dynamics in a specific field, but also frequently a clash of national cultures. Social context can be understood as a field, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) defined the field as: a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents ór institutions, by their presentand potential situation in the structure of the distribution of species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective relation to other positions (domination, subordination, homology, etc.) (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 97).
Bourdieu’s concept of field has been used to study topics like religion (Bourdieu & de Saint Martin, 1982), literature (Bourdieu, 1983), the lifestyles of different social classes (Bourdieu, 1984), and higher education institutions (Bourdieu, 1988). Unfortunately, Bourdieu did not apply the concept of field to the study of translation. It was not until Jean-Marc Gouanvic that the concept of field began to be used to examine translation. Gouanvic demonstrated the influence of different factors and agents on the creation of translations, coming to the conclusion that the stakes of translation are highly legitimate practices endowed with power, on the basis of which translation treaties, operating in various social spaces, are continuously renegotiated (Gouanvic, 1997, p. 146; 2002, p. 167).
The entirety of society can be likened to a vast field that is made up of numerous autonomous sub-fields, such as the political, economic, literary, and power fields (Bourdieu, 1983). According to Bourdieu (1977, p. 81), in a highly differentiated setting, these small socialized worlds are spaces of objective relations with their own logic and necessity. With sub-fields interconnected, different fields will always constrain and influence one another.
Politics has frequently been contextualized as the omnipresent power throughout the study of the history of translation, but just as discursive power is not equally distributed to everyone, neither is translation an exchange based on equality. In the context of globalization, uneven global economic development and political inequalities have resulted in an objective impossibility of equal cultural exchange, which is only a surface phenomenon of translation activities and a by-product of political activities. Although the literary field has its own set of rules, literary translation manipulation is primarily the result of professionals and patrons, and translation is inextricably linked to the literary field (professionals) and the power field (patrons), the extent of which varies from time to time and from country to country. Translation, in this sense, is a political and power-driven literary activity.
Previous Sociological Studies of The Three-Body Trilogy and Research Questions
Translation does not occur in a vacuum, and it has its limitations to treat translation as a pure language conversion activity. The sociology of The Three-Body Trilogy, the most well-known work of Chinese literature in the English-speaking world, has only been the subject of nine studies. S. H. Song (2017) mentioned foreign publisher’s capital support, but all of the other topics were focused on translators, and the translation environment was not explored. H. Li (2017) examined the capital added by the author and the original text, the capital role of translator and publishers. Li’s study neglected to look at the overall context of the translated text’s translation. Yang’s (2017) research was restricted to the cultural and symbolic capital of the translator, the symbolic capital of the original work, the publisher’s social capital, as well as a study of translator’s habitus. J. Y. Liu (2019) examined only translator’s habitus, methods for accumulating capital, and translation techniques. Habitus of the translator and the target language readers were the main topics of Shan’s (2019) study. Ken Liu’s translator behavior was the focus of L. X. Zhang’s (2019) analysis, whereas Ren’s (2020) analysis was restricted to translator’s habitus and translation strategies. Deng and Goh (2022) investigated the positive role of social, cultural, and symbolic capital in the dissemination and reception of The Three-Body Trilogy, identifying that the social capital of celebrities such as Obama, the cultural capital of the Hugo Award, and the symbolic capital of Clarke, as well as the box office miracle of The Wandering Earth, all played a role in promoting the trilogy and attracting readers. Y. Wu’s (2020) research backed up the active facilitator role of the author, the intermediary roles of foreign and Chinese publisher, and the use of multimedia tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Goodreads for the international distribution of translations. However, Wu failed to go into further details about the political, economic, and cultural background environment of translation, despite mentioning that the capital support of Chinese publisher created a favorable environment for translation.
In conclusion, existing researches based on Bourdieu’s sociological theory have yielded some achievements on the studies of capital and habitus, as well as drawn the attention of academic circles to the social translation study. Concerning the sociological study of the English translation of The Three-Body Trilogy, it is discovered that studies on the filed and translation context are insufficient.
Field theory employs a relationalist methodology to investigate the various dynamics and variables that influence translation activities, with a focus on the two-way interaction between sociocultural variables and translation production. This, in turn, has the potential to deviate from linguistic research paradigms preoccupied with interlinguistic transformations and cultural research paradigms with ideological determinism. The nature of translation has evolved as time rolls on, and the need for translation created by cultural and economic advancement has pushed to transcend purely linguistic and cultural boundaries. Exploring the social nature of translation effectively requires placing it in a socio-economic context created by participants like state authorities, publishers, patrons, and translators. The present study aims to fill this gap in the literature by addressing the following questions:
(1) What efforts has the Chinese government made to create a favorable field and external environment for The Three-Body Trilogy? And how have these efforts influenced its translation and dissemination?
(2) What efforts have the non-governmental forces made to create a favorable field and external environment for The Three-Body Trilogy? And how have these efforts influenced its translation and dissemination?
Methodology
Descriptive translation studies, also known as “empirical research” (Tymoczko, 1999, p. 25), integrates translation into studies of the times, politics, ideology, economy, and culture. It discusses various factors that affect the choice of translation materials, the translator’s translation strategy, and the acceptance of the translation (Hermans, 2004, p. 21). The research’s starting point is a variety of internal and external factors of the text (Toury, 2001, p. 65), including translations and statements from translators, editors, and publishers.
Descriptive research design is mainly used to study the favorable field and environment supported by Chinese government and non-governmental forces. The researchers can analyze the changes and contents in news reporting and review, such as analysis of news from BCC corpus (one of the world’s largest Chinese newspapers and magazines corpus, http://bcc.blcu.edu.cn/) and NOW corpus (News on the Web, one of the world’s largest English newspapers and magazines corpus, www.english-corpora.org/now/) of Chinese literary translation to investigate the policy support of Chinese government for Chinese literary works going global (from related news reports of official website of relevant authorities and institutions), as well as the contents, numbers and scale of translation activities of non-governmental translators to investigate the support of non-governmental forces for Chinese literary works going out (from related news reports of official website of relevant authorities and institutions).
Results and Discussion
The Political Field
Literary translation, in addition to being a kind of cultural exchange, is also a government-led project that enlists the assistance of government entities, in order to demonstrate their cultural soft power. Field is a relatively autonomous small social world, with its own logic and necessity. It is neither a geographical territory nor an ideological concept of domain.
Any social formation is structured by way of a hierarchically organized series of fields (the economic field, the educational field, the political field, the cultural field, etc.), each defined as a structured space with its own laws of functioning and its own relations of force independent of those of politics and the economy, except, obviously, in the cases of the economic and political fields (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 6)
Despite the fact that Bourdieu did not explicitly define the political field, this study can conclude that the political field in literary translation refers to the area of influence that a literary work may have when it crosses national borders due to political factors between different countries or regions, which in turn reflects the political relations and cultural exchanges. The political field in literary translation can influence which works receive more support and dissemination in a specific country or region, and it is possible to understand how a country promotes its values and ideology through literature and how it influences the cultural identity of other countries or regions by examining the political field in literary translation.
Any abstract idea and subjective concept that exist in the environment of the source language are anticipated to enter the discursive center of the society, where they are translated and to fulfill a new beneficial role through translation. The manipulation of translation activities by the state power can influence which idea or concept enters the discourse of the translating society, and the expectation of a discursive construction function reinforces the illusion that the state power is involved in the struggle for the field. It is common for governments to sponsor the translation and publication of national literary works in other countries. The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature in Netherlands and Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature in Israel are two classic examples of national institutions funding the dissemination and development of their own literature works.
The literary world is a hierarchical and unequal place that is rife with capital competition, including that for linguistic and literary capital. Language is the foundation of literary capital, which includes literary genre, literary form, and poetic tradition. As a result, the competition between literary spaces is essentially a competition between languages. Some literary fields are labeled as “dominant,” whereas others become “dominated” fields, depending on the capital they have amassed (Casanova, 2015, pp. 153–170). Despite having a long history, numerous users, and readers, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, and other languages and literature still hold a subordinate position in the world of literature (Casanova, 2009, p. 290). Chinese, Arabic, and Hindi are languages with substantial populations of speakers, yet their usage is largely limited to the Asian region. Besides, the utilization of these languages is further influenced by historical and political factors. For instance, during the colonial era, European languages were widely disseminated and became the dominant ones for international communication, whereas other languages were repressed. Consequently, this resulted in the more widespread diffusion and usage of European languages worldwide. When a new member significantly changes who they are upon entering or leaving a field, this is referred to as sacralization (Bourdieu, 1981, p. 265). When something is sanctified, there is a noticeable transitional change in its status and course. Literary sanctification takes the form of works being acknowledged by eminent critics, being represented across literary genres, and having the legitimacy and literary nature of works recognized (Casanova, 2004, p. 126).
Participation in socioeconomic networks serves a variety of purposes, and translation is merely a means by which participants can realize their interests. Different interests may result in various demands for particular translation procedures. Any abstract idea, irrational notion, or social existence that exists in the environment of the source language might be expected to enter the discourse center of the society that is translating it and achieves a new beneficial function through translation.
Depending on how actively they participate in translation activities, participants can be roughly divided into core participants (directly involved in translation activities, like translators and publishers) and peripheral participants (indirectly involved in translation activities such as state power departments). Even if peripheral participants are not required to carry out translation activities, their influence on translation cannot be ignored.
Patron of the English Translation of The Three-Body Trilogy
Books are one of the most significant means of disseminating ideas and culture, and the copyright trade is still one of the primary methods of promoting a nation’s books abroad. Exporting books and engaging in international publishing are significant means by which a country can disseminate its culture, history, and social conditions to foreign readers, thereby increasing the country’s global influence and discursive power. Concurrently, international publishing represents a form of cultural soft power projection, whereby a country’s books and publications reflect its cultural traditions, innovative capacity, and ideological values, thereby shaping the country’s cultural image on the global stage. The quantity of a country’s books is also one of the significant indicators of the cultural influence of that nation on the global stage (Qian & Liu, 2016, p. 42).
According to the Chinese news in the BCC corpus (see Figure 1), the researchers can find that the translation and dissemination of The Three-Body Trilogy was funded by the Classic China International Publishing Project, Silk Road Literary Project, and other projects. The Classic China International Publishing Project, as part of the Chinese government-sponsored literature dissemination projects abroad, not only helps Chinese literature, including The Three-Body Trilogy, to be translated and published from the dominated field to the world through government intervention by providing funding for translation, but also has improved the overall international dissemination environment for Chinese literature to some extent. The international publication of literary works typically entails a multitude of costly processes, including translation, editing, and publication. Furthermore, due to the high market risk involved, commercial publishers may not be inclined to take on the financial risk of publishing literary works if profits are not projected to be sufficiently high. Government economic support can provide financial assistance for the translation, editing, and publication processes of literary works, thereby enabling their publication and dissemination. Government funding can also foster the diversity and regionalism of literary works, promote the cultural soft power of the country, and ultimately enhance the country’s international profile and stature.
Screenshot from the BCC corpus.
Direct Translation of the content of Figure 1: The translation and publication of The Three-Body Trilogy have been funded by the Classic China International Publishing Project (starting year 2009), Silk Road Literary Project (starting year 2014) and other projects for the overseas dissemination of Chinese literature and culture. As of February 16, 2016, the Classic China International Publishing Project and Silk Road Literary Project have funded more than 2,900 Chinese books with a total amount of nearly RMB 150 million (about 21 million US dollars), which has effectively improved the quantity and quality of Chinese publication copyright export.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the relevant Chinese cultural departments have planned and carried out a number of funding projects that cover book translation and dissemination. In 2009, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of China organized and implemented the Classic China International Publishing Project (经典中国国际出版工程; Jingdian Zhongguo Guoji Chuban Gongcheng). As a national publishing project, it has received a great deal of attention from Chinese and international publishing organizations since its inception. Publishers from China and abroad are among the recipients of funding. With the project, foreign publishers can directly sign funding agreements in order to receive funding for translation and publication (Qian & Liu, 2016, p. 42). Since 2013, a number of foreign publishers and copyright agents (including Tor Books, the American publisher of the English translation of The Three-Body Trilogy) have added their names to the list of program applicants (Jiang, 2018, p. 28). At the moment, Classic China International Publishing Project has gradually attracted a large number of world-renowned publishing institutions to participate in this project, including the Tor Books (USA), Penguin Random House (USA), Simon & Schuster (USA), John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (USA), CENGAGE Learning (USA), Macmillan Publishers Ltd. (UK), Taylor & Francis Group (UK), Springer Group (German), Philippe Picquier Publishing (France), Harper Collins Publishers (Canada), Leiden University Press (Netherlands), The Duan Press (Japan), and many other publishers.
The Project applies an expert review system to position the recipients of funding, and has established a pool of review experts. The experts are composed of government managers, Chinese and foreign practitioners, experts and scholars in the fields of translation, literature, philosophy, history, economics, sociology, and so on. The experts at the project are all highly regarded, authoritative, and representative figures in their fields who excel at identifying and developing up-and-coming writers. For example, China Education Book Import & Export Co., Ltd. signed a contract with Tor Books for the English version of The Three-Body Trilogy and applied for a translation and publishing grant to invite high-level translators. The reviewers of the Classic China International Publishing Project considered that the The Three-Body Trilogy is a representative work of Chinese Sci-fi and has great market potential, and approved the translation subsidy (Qian & Liu, 2016, p. 42). Upon witnessing the popularity of The Three-Body Trilogy in China, the reviewers of the Classic China International Publishing Project recognized its potential for international success and identified financial support as a crucial means of facilitating its translation and publication abroad, thereby advancing its global dissemination. This action further underscores the government’s prioritization and endorsement of the cultural industry and its soft power.
Ken Liu and Joel Martinsen were in charge of translating the The Three-Body Trilogy into English. The English translation of The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award in August 2015, just a few months after its English-language release in 2014. The Hugo Award represents Sci-fi literature’s highest honor. This not only illustrates the beneficial impact of government-sponsored translation projects on the translation and publication of Chinese literature abroad, but it also, to some extent, indicates the successful entry of Chinese Sci-fi literature into the Western-dominated literary and cultural market.
The Classic China International Publishing Project has funded a total of 1,637 Chinese books between 2009 and 2021, of which 418 (25.5%) are literary works. With literature receiving one of the highest funding levels, it is evident from the data that the project supports a wide range of books in a variety of subject areas, including economics, science and technology, law, history, geography, architecture, children, art, religion, the environment, and many others. The project funded the English translation and publication of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Trilogy in 2013, as well as the English version of Cixin Liu’s Ball Lighting and The Supernova Era in 2015 and 2017, respectively. In addition to the English translation and publication of Cixin Liu’s Sci-fi, the project has also funded the Norwegian version of The Three-Body Trilogy (2019), the Japanese version of Ball Lighting (2020), the German version of The Supernova Era (2020), the Arabic version of Wandering Earth, and the Spanish version of Of Ants and Dinosaurs. It can be said that the project is credited with the global publication of Cixin Liu’s Chinese Sci-fi novels, including The Three-Body Trilogy. The success of The Three-Body Trilogy attests to the pivotal role that government funding plays in advancing the international dissemination of Chinese literary works, thereby furnishing plausible models and incentives for the overseas publication of other Chinese literary works. Accordingly, the Classic China International Publishing Project persists in endowing financial aid for Cixin Liu’s additional Sci-fi creations and disseminating them globally, with a view to augmenting the global recognition and proliferation of Chinese literary works, and magnifying China’s cultural soft power and international prestige. Moreover, continued financial backing and international publication of Cixin Liu’s other Sci-fi works aids in broadening his readership, bolstering his international renown and influence within the literary community. Thus, this can generate greater interest among international readers in The Three-Body Trilogy, and by extension, Chinese literature and culture.
With the ability to disseminate Chinese culture outside of China still limited, it is difficult to promote the dissemination solely through the internal competition mechanism of the book rights trade market. The external influence of government funding for translation and publishing has greatly shortened the translation and publishing production cycle, allowing Chinese books to gradually emerge in the mainstream overseas book market.
Enabler of the International IP of The Three-Body Trilogy
If The Classic China International Publishing Project assisted in getting The Three-Body Trilogy out of China and into the world, The Silk Road Literary Project has helped to keep the trilogy popular internationally, eventually helping to make the trilogy one of China’s top 10 IPs of the year in September 2022. The capacity of a work to attain classic status and become an intellectual property (IP) generally depends on its enduring artistic and commercial value. While some works may experience a fleeting burst of popularity, they will inevitably fade away if they lack lasting artistic merit. However, if a work is consistently promoted and publicized, it stands a better chance of gaining wider recognition and acceptance, and eventually being considered a classic. Moreover, if the work embodies commercial value, it may be leveraged as an IP to facilitate the development of entertainment products such as movies, TV shows, and games, further enhancing its impact and commercial potential. As such, persistent promotion and marketing efforts can facilitate the gradual transformation of a work into a classic and an IP.
On December 5, 2014, the CPC (the Communist Party of China) Central Committee’s Publicity Department approved the Silk Road Literary Project (丝路书香出版工程, Silu Shuxiang Chuban Gongcheng). It is one of the major projects chosen as part of China’s “The Belt and Road Initiative” (a global infrastructure development strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013), which is organized and implemented by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television. From then on, a new chapter in Chinese literature has begun by going abroad (T. Song, 2017, p. 144).
The Silk Road Literary Project relies on an optimized environment for international production of Chinese literature as The Belt and Road Initiative deepens. Since 2015, the Chinese government has been actively advocating the joint construction of The Belt and Road Initiative, as a result, a series of related promotion programs have been formulated by various industries in recent years, for example, China has set up special scholarships for The Belt and Road Initiative and the Silk Road Young Scholars Grant Program, implemented science and humanities exchange programs, established education alliances, The Belt and Road Initiative journalism cooperation alliances, The Belt and Road Initiative national publishing cooperation, implemented The Belt and Road Initiative library cooperation projects, and The Belt and Road Initiative copyright trade cooperation programs, which have directly or indirectly created favorable conditions for the overseas translation and publication of Chinese literature (Wang, 2019, p. 6).
Since 2015, The Silk Road Literary Project has funded a total of 2,550 Chinese books to be published and distributed internationally until the end of 2021, with the number of grants remaining between 250 and 450 per year and gradually stabilizing at 300 per year. Table 1 below provides information on the number of Chinese book translations that The Silk Road Literary Project has supported over the years.
Number of Books Funded by The Silk Road Literary Project Each Year.
If the Classic China International Publishing Project promoted the popularity of The Three-Body Trilogy in the English world, the Silk Road Literary Project has helped The Three-Body Trilogy gradually establish itself as a well-known IP worldwide. Since its inception in 2015, The Silk Road Literary Project has funded the translation and publication of The Three-Body Trilogy in nine languages over the course of 7 years, including Hungarian (2015), Turkish (2015), Polish (2016), Czech (2016), Thai (2016), Russian (2017), Indonesian (2019), Dutch (2020), and Hebrew translations (2021). The impact of The Three-Body Trilogy on a global scale has been significantly increased.
In addition to Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Trilogy, The Silk Road Literary Project has also funded other Sci-fi novels by Cixin Liu, such as the translation and publication of Supernova Era in Vietnamese (2018), the translation and publication of Wandering Earth and Other Sci-fi in Polish (2020), and in Russian (2021), which has given some exposure and won popularity in the overseas dissemination of Chinese Sci-fi and laid a solid foundation for the subsequent overseas dissemination of Chinese Sci-fi literature.
With The Three-Body Trilogy successively winning The Kurd Laßwitz Award (one of the major German Sci-fi literary awards, 2017), Premios Kelvin and Premios Ignotus (two of the most prestigious Sci-fi awards in Spain, 2017), Premio Italia (international Sci-fi award in Italy, 2018), and The Seiun Award (one of the most prestigious Sci-fi awards in Japan, 2020), the multilingual edition of The Three-Body Trilogy continued to sell well around the world with increasing international influence, and was selected as one of the Top 10 Chinese National IPs of the Year 2021 in September 2022. According to the statistics of China Education Book Import & Export Corporation, translations of The Three-Body Trilogy in various languages have received praise from many foreign mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post in the United States, Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany, El Pas in Spain, Polish National Radio, Finnish National Radio, Swedish National Radio, and others. As of July 2020, The Three-Body Trilogy, operated and exported by China Education Book Import & Export Corporation, has exported the rights in 26 languages, with more than 2.6 million copies sold worldwide in foreign languages, whereas the English version alone was included in the collections of more than 1,350 overseas libraries worldwide (J. J. Wu, 2021, p. 173).
The popularity of The Three-Body Trilogy in a single country denotes its acceptance and broad readership within that particular cultural milieu, albeit with limited audience and influence. Conversely, its popularity across multiple countries signifies that its worth and attraction surpass the boundaries of a specific cultural sphere, thereby attracting wider audience and more expansive influence. The recognition and praise accorded to The Three-Body Trilogy through its receipt of significant awards in several countries and extensive coverage in mainstream media, indicate its global reception and acclaim, thereby bolstering its position as a work of enduring artistic value. Furthermore, these accolades amplify the commercial potential of The Three-Body Trilogy as an IP, presenting greater prospects for the development of entertainment products, including literary adaptations, films, and games.
Newcomers to the political field of the literary world can follow both orthodoxy and heterodoxy models. In order to maintain the status quo of the literary world and their own position, Western literature in a strong culture usually adopts orthodoxy. The dominated literature of weaker cultures tends to adopt heterodoxy in order to challenge existing beliefs and the market-driven world literary market through power intervention and capital support, in order to break the existing hierarchical structure.
The Literary Field
The literary field can be viewed as a playground, with the stakes as various types of capital held by participants. To ensure that the game is played effectively, the participants need to reach some kind of agreement on the game and the stakes, and this agreement implies a collective agreement on the field’s inner rules (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 114; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 98). In conjunction with Bourdieu’s concept of field, this study interprets the literary field as referring to the various contexts and elements involved in the translation and dissemination of a literary work, including the translator, the reader, the cultural aspects of language, history, society, and values, the channels of publication and dissemination, as well as the pertinent literary reviews and criticisms, and so on.
Literature is a distinct form of power that operates similarly to capital but with its own unique rules for implementation. However, literary autonomy is merely a relative concept because it is frequently exchanged for positional authority within institutions or the economy. The literary field has grown and separated itself from the political and economic fields over time (Swartz, 2012, p. 147). More than they reflect the needs of consumers, the struggling cultural producers and the cultural products they create reflect their corresponding positions of dominance in this struggle (Swartz, 2012, p. 151). The dynamics of the fields of cultural production are determined by the functional logic of the fields of production of cultural goods, including fiction and the strategies of differentiation that shape those dynamics.
The Guide of The Three-Body Trilogy into American Sci-fi
The literary world serves as both a force field and an arena for changing or preserving power dynamics. Each participant develops strategies whose overall direction depends on his or her position in the power struggle, or the specific capital he or she possesses, using the power (i.e., capital) acquired from prior struggles (Gouanvic, 2005, p. 151).
Ken Liu, the principal translator of The Three-Body Trilogy, is a well-known American Sci-fi writer with a solid name and influence, and his translations are expected to draw more American readers. Ken Liu, who hails from a bicultural family, is conversant with both Chinese and American cultural and social backgrounds. Chinese Sci-fi works may be better communicated to American readers through his translation, helping them transcend linguistic and cultural barriers as well as promote cross-cultural communication. As a result, it fosters to expand Ken Liu’s Chinese audience and enhance the effect of his works in China.
The genesis of Chinese Sci-fi can be traced back to ancient times, specifically to the genre of ancient mythical and fantastic stories. These works contain supernatural and fantastical elements that bear similarities to those found in Sci-fi. However, these ancient literary works can be regarded as a part of China’s ancient fantasy literature and cannot be directly classified as Sci-fi in the modern sense. In 1891, Timothy Richard translated Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward into Chinese, accomplishing the first dissemination of Sci-fi in the modern sense in China. However, it wasn’t until nearly 50 years later, in 1964, that China’s Sci-fi was first introduced to the rest of the world, with Lao She’s Cat Country translated by James E. Dew. Since then, China’s Sci-fi has expanded internationally. From 1964 to 2010, 15 Chinese Sci-fi novels were translated into English. From 2011 to 2014, the number of translations increased dramatically to 59 (Gao & Wang, 2021). To some extent, 2015 was a watershed for Chinese Sci-fi when The Three-Body Problem (translated by Ken Liu) won the Hugo Award, as the first time Asian Sci-fi has won this award.
Since 2015, the English world has paid close attention to Chinese Sci-fi, and the number of translations and publications has reached an all-time high. However, the translation and dissemination of Chinese Sci-fi cannot be separated from the efforts of Sci-fi translators. Ken Liu is the most diligent and accomplished among them all. From 2015 to 2020, a total of 150 Chinese Sci-fi novels were translated and published in the English world (Gao & Wang, 2021), with Ken Liu translating 36 of them. Table 2 contains a translation of Chinese Sci-fi translated by Ken Liu.
Ken Liu’s Translations of Chinese Sci-fi.
Jingfang Hao, the author of Folding Beijing (Hugo Award winner, translated by Ken Liu), stated in the preface of Staying Behind that “Ken Liu is an excellent writer, not merely a translator. He assists Chinese Sci-fi writers to translate and disseminate out of his feelings and sense of responsibility for Chinese Sci-fi. Without his excellent translation and introduction, Chinese Sci-fi could not be known to the world” (K. Liu, 2017). It can be concluded from Figure 2 that the English translation of The Three-Body Problem is closer to the original author’s vision than the Chinese version, and Ken Liu’s significant changes to the Chinese original in the English translation only improve The Three-Body Problem. Furthermore, Ken Liu avoids some sexist issues in the English translation, such as changes made to the original text’s sexist content.
Screenshot from the NOW corpus.
Cultural translation is inseparable from cultural differences and translator identity. From the perspective of an overseas Chinese, literary translation is not only an opportunity for cross-cultural communication, but also a platform for cultural education (Sun, 2006, p. 6). According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, this idea of translation is also referred to as “thick translation,” with the intention of educating readers about culture through literary translation. Thick translations, often in the form of annotations and its accompanying glosses, seek to place the translation in its deep linguistic and cultural context (Appiah, 1993, p. 817), presenting the source text in the context in which it occurs and thus blending the meaning obscured by the text with the translator’s intentions.
Ken Liu added footnotes to terms, which were uncommon in English novels, to help English readers understand the extensive Chinese cultural background of The Three-Body Trilogy. Ken Liu explained that his principle was: “the displayed information just satisfies the reader’s need to understand the content of the story, but at the same time, curious readers can go online to explore more in-depth details” (Yin, 2018). According to an interview with Joel Martinsen (Deng & Goh, 2023), the translator of volume 2, he was invited to a talk with Ken Liu, the author Cixin Liu, the rights holders, and a few other Sci-fi writers. Several aspects of the translation process were discussed. The footnotes in the Chinese edition, on the other hand, are mostly served as glosses on scientific terms, biographical sketches of famous people, or Chinese translations of English language abbreviations that aren’t required to maintain the same abbreviations as in English.
However, because Martinsen’s translation was volume 2, Ken Liu had added a plethora of footnotes. The editor, Liz Gorinsky, decided to keep footnotes because Ken Liu already had constituted that style, so they bombarded Martinsen with questions and indicated textual locations where they thought footnotes might be appropriate. Based on the previous requirements, Martinsen drafted footnotes for the majority of the extracted letters, which resulted in those footnotes.
Ken Liu added 37 footnotes to the English translation of volume 1, including 15 on political culture, 7 on particular things (i.e., places, objects, etc.), 5 on history and culture, 4 on historical figures, 3 on astronomical scientific knowledge, 2 on unusual expressions of Chinese, 1 on religious culture, 1 on original word meaning, and 1 on implied name meaning. Ken Liu conveyed the social purpose and readers’ expectations of the translation while also introducing the story’s cultural and ideological underpinnings to general readers. Through the translator’s footnotes, the English version of The Three-Body Trilogy expands the cultural references in the original text from point to surface, introduces English readers to Chinese political culture such as cadre and cowshed, Chinese historical and cultural background such as the Warring States Period, King Zhou of Shang, and Chinese historical figures such as Mozi and their representative ideological connotations through the development of the plot, and realizes the purpose of helping Chinese culture and thought going global through Chinese stories.
Like the book cover, readers will focus their attention on the back cover first. The back cover serves as both a supplement to the front cover’s content and frequently includes recommendations from well-known experts to win readers’ trust and establish their authority. “Book review indexes and other publications can assist readers in finding books that interest them” (Kumar, 2018, p. 34). Celebrities have a greater potential to influence people’s thoughts and decisions because they are opinion leaders (Harvey, 2014, p. 13).
Authors, translators, and publishers frequently invite celebrities and well-known experts in the field to write reviews and make recommendations in order to foster their positions in the fierce market competition, generating publicity and promotion for books through their celebrity effects (Teng & Wen, 2017, p. 82). The Three-Body Trilogy began as a novel serialized in Science Fiction World (a well-known Chinese Sci-fi magazine) in 2006. Following its publication, it received consistent praise from Chinese Sci-fi readers (Gu, 2017, p. 11). And in the second year, it won the 18th China Science Fiction Galaxy Award, the highest award in Chinese Sci-fi. The Galaxy Award not only motivates the author to continue serializing The Three-Body Trilogy, but also helps the novel obtain funds for publishing books separately as well as gives the novel the opportunity to receive joint recommendations from famous Chinese Sci-fi writers.
Famous Chinese Sci-fi writers Song Han, Jinkang Wang, and Yan Wu have discussed the highlights of The Three-Body Trilogy from various perspectives, such as “it almost perfectly integrates China’s 5000 year history with the reality of the universe of 15 billion years (Han) from the perspective of narration and conception,”“it reflects on history and reality, and exposes the human soul to the distant universe (Wang) from the perspective of ideological connotation,” and “it shows everything that human civilization has experienced in the universe, and it brings us shock, feeling and thinking (Wu).”
However, because Chinese Sci-fi is still on the periphery of world Sci-fi literature (J. Liu, 2021, p. 62), well-known Chinese Sci-fi writers are also limited to Chinese readers. Based on this, the recommendations of all Chinese celebrities have been replaced in the English version. To bring the mysterious The Three-Body Trilogy from the East to the attention of English readers and the media, Ken Liu has invited a number of internationally renowned Sci-fi writers to help the trilogy gain the attention and recognition of experts and readers in the American Sci-fi field.
Among them, David Brin (won the Hugo prize four times) has the highest frequency. He successively wrote the recommendation on the back cover of the three volumes. In the English translation of volume 1, Brin wrote that “The Three-Body Problem ponders several Big Questions of our time. Cixin Liu stands at the top layer of speculative fiction authors in any language. Ken Liu’s smooth translation makes this a must-read for any who truly wish to explore bold, new perspectives.” In volume 2, Brin commented that “The Three-Body Trilogy may be one of the greatest epics of twenty-first-century science fiction.” In volume 3, Brin added, “The Three-Body epic concludes with sweep and scope and majesty, worthy of Frederik Pohl or Poul Anderson, Scholar Wu or H. G. Wells (all of whom are renowned Sci-fi authors).”
The Three-Body Problem was praised as “The best kind of science fiction, familiar but strange all at the same time” by Kim Stanley Robinson (multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner). Additionally, Robinson added the following on the English translation of the back cover of volume 1: “I hope we’ll get to read more by Cixin Liu, and for now applaud this great entry.” For The Three-Body Trilogy, Ben Bova, Aliette de Bodard, Mike Resnick, Annalee Newitz, and Lavie Tidhar have all written recommendations. Six-time Hugo Award winner Bova praised the book, saying that “the Sci-fi is a first-rate work by a powerful new voice,” and that “the author brings to the reader a deep and insightful vision of China past and future.” Bodard (three Nebula Awards and three BSFA Awards winner) recommended that “it merges virtual realities, alien invasions, and exciting science, and manages to make them all fresh. It is a tour de force walk through Chinese and world history.” Resnick (five Hugo awards winner) stated it “deserved all of its plaudits.”“If you love computers, this novel should be on your must-read list,” said Hugo Award winner Newitz. Tidhar (who has won numerous awards, including the World Fantasy Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award) exclaimed, “it is nothing short of a masterpiece.” Ken Liu’s translation and dissemination of Chinese Sci-fi is far more than just being a translator. When Chinese Sci-fi writer Xia Jia sent an email to Ken Liu, she exclaimed: “I can’t believe these people really read The Three-Body Trilogy.” Ken Liu replied, “I asked them to read it” (Yin, 2018).
The endorsement of internationally renowned Sci-fi writers has significant implications for the global dissemination of The Three-Body Trilogy. These writers often hold a high reputation and influence in their respective countries and regions, and their endorsement can aid in expanding the recognition of The Three-Body Trilogy. Furthermore, the recommendations of renowned Sci-fi writers provide professional and authoritative validation of the work. These writers typically have a global reputation, and their endorsement can provide substantial support and promotion for The Three-Body Trilogy to receive recognition through important awards and accolades on an international level. The endorsement of multiple internationally recognized writers can also influence readers from different countries to perceive The Three-Body Trilogy as a work with a similar style and quality to that of a specific writer, thereby contributing to an increased readership and improving the overall status of Chinese Sci-fi literature.
If a politician wishes to enter the literary field, he or she needs to first gain the acceptance of the participants in the literary field in some way recognized by the literary community, such as by gaining the praise of literary critics, and thus appears to have more legitimacy in the process. This type of interconnectedness and influence among the various actors in the field is known as the effect of refraction, and Ken Liu is the guide and recommended expert on The Three-Body Trilogy’s path to legitimacy in the US Sci-fi field.
Solid Backing for The Three-Body Trilogy in America
In a market-based literary field, not only translators, who have cultural capital, do have a certain voice, but publishers, who have the illusion of commercial profit, also use literary and social capital to maximize the economic returns of book publishing. The cover design is the most obvious way to entice readers to purchase and read the book. It conveys both the basic information about the work and the imagery combination that the author, translator, and publisher want to express the most (Hu & Tan, 2021, p. 110). As opposed to the standard publishing procedure for the Chinese version’s cover, Tor Books, the foreign publisher of The Three-Body Trilogy, paid more attention to the English version’s cover and asked internationally renowned Sci-fi illustrator Stephan Martinière to create the cover himself.
The trilogy was first published when author was still a recluse in China. Chongqing Publishing House, the series’ publisher, had no idea the series would go on to win numerous national and international awards. As a result, the publisher failed to give the trilogy any additional preferential care at the time. Thus, the cover of the first printing did not meet the highest standards in terms of color balancing, design, and perspective effect, and even the cover style of the series was not consistent (as shown in Figure 3).
Cover image of the Chinese version of The Three-Body Trilogy (C. X. Liu, 2008a, 2008b, 2010).
Visual grammar is “an account of explicit and implicit knowledge and practices around a resource, consisting of the elements and rules underlying a culture-specific form of visual communication” (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 3). In terms of color palette, the color scheme of the volume 1 and volume 3 is warm, creating a hot visual effect. The color palette in volume 2 is cold, with eerie woods and silhouettes of people whose faces are hidden, leaving the reader the impression that they are reading a horror or paranormal novel. In terms of graphic form, the images on the cover of the trilogy are crowded, depriving the reader of the sense of insignificance, emptiness, and unreality that Sci-fi possesses. The elements on the cover are also larger in size, giving the reader a visual sense of oppression. Additionally, The trilogy lacks the uniformity of the cover, with the exception of volume 3, which shares the orb element with volume 1 but not volume 2.
The English version of The Three-Body Trilogy can be quite elaborate and close in style in terms of design. Stephan Martinière, the cover designer, is a well-known Sci-fi artist. He began creating cover art in 2000 and has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Chesley Award. He has also worked on the production of many well-known Sci-fi films and games, including Star Wars, I, Robot, and Star Trek. Martinière added symbolism and meaning to space-time and the universe in the English version of The Three-Body Problem through factors such as the one-eye on the cover and the pyramid, with the giant mechanical device above the pyramid (the imaginary figure of Sophon unfolding in the story) being particularly surprising, its design inspired by a trip Martinière took to the Galileo Museum in Florence. He drew on the exquisite armillary sphere and other mechanical devices in the museum to create the image of Sophon in the book (Sohu News, 2018), and the finished figure is not only exquisitely structured, but also demonstrates a strong technological and graphic sense in terms of visual effects, design, and perspective (as shown in Figure 4).
Cover image of the English version of The Three-Body Trilogy (C. X. Liu, 2014, 2015, 2016).
In terms of color palette, the tones in the English version of volume 1 are cooler, the tones in volume 2 are warmer, while the tones in volume 3 are a mixture of warm and cool, for example, the center has warm tones while the circle around it has cool tones. In terms of graphic form, the English version of The Three-Body Trilogy is more a reflection of the designer’s subtle and meticulous integration of graphic elements, tones, font arrangement, and size, which inspires the reader to choose what to read.
Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) argue that images have three major meta-functions, namely representational, interactional, and compositional meanings. Representational meanings are divided into narrative representations and conceptual representations (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). There are vectors, or bitmap images, in narrative representations, and in the English version of the trilogy, Martinière used the orb element as the bitmap image. This orb element allowed for the optimization of a large number of details and enhanced the hierarchy and coherence of the image.
There are three kinds of conceptual representations: classificational, analytical, and symbolic processes (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). The analytical processes in cover design involve the relationship between the parts and the whole (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 87). In Figure 4, the readers may be able to relate to the English version of the trilogy and get the impression that they are part of a series due to the font size and arrangement of the titles on the covers. Symbolic processes indicate who the participants are (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006, p. 105), and readers can speculate about the plot by looking at the detailed elements on the cover, which can pique their interest in reading. Interactional meaning requires the reader’s attention and recognition (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006, pp. 116–122), whereas compositional meaning tells the reader what information is important by the position and size of the elements in the image. The font arrangement and size direct the reader to consider where to place these components and details, such as which one to look at first.
Tor Books has accumulated an efficient distribution system along with the corresponding cultural capital as an English-language Sci-fi and fantasy publishing brand that has won the Best Science Fiction Publisher Award. Since May 2014, Tor Books has been building up the excitement for its release. In addition to publishing Cixin Liu’s autobiographical essay (translated by Ken Liu) on its official website, it has also regularly posted excerpts from The Three-Body Trilogy on its website and social media accounts to pique the interest of potential readers. On the day of the book’s release, it also launched various events like a reading lottery. Tor Books also used a number of articles in publications like the New York Times and Publishers Weekly to increase its visibility in the Sci-fi community. The trilogy won several best book awards, like the NPR’s Best Books of the Year, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Top 100 Books of the Year, and Hudson’s Best Books of the Year.
The extent to which Cixin Liu’s works are distributed abroad is also greatly facilitated by the quality of editing. The editor, Liz Gorinsky, has over 10 years of publishing and editing experience, and in 2017 she won the Hugo Award for Best Editor. Liz assisted Ken Liu in improving every aspect of the translation, which Ken Liu considers to be one of the best editing experiences he has had thus far (in translator’s postscript of The Three-Body Problem). Tor Books’ editorial touch-ups and adjustments have been one of the reasons for The Three-Body Trilogy’s bestsellers in the target language market. Furthermore, Tor Books has launched multimedia versions such as Kindle electronic editions and audiobooks on Amazon, the world’s most influential online book sales platform, in a timely manner, allowing the trilogy to compete in a more diverse format with online and mobile users of the digital age (Y. Wu & Chen, 2020, p. 39).
Tor Books has followed the marketing model of The Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games for the marketing strategy of The Three-Body Trilogy, that is, publishing three volumes one by one in a steady step over a period of 3 years, with a certain interval, apparently in order to gradually attract and grow the readership. Since its release in 2014, The Three-Body Trilogy in English has become one of the most widely read works of Chinese literature among readers abroad. It also set records for the number of copies in foreign libraries and the highest overseas sales of Chinese literature (J. J. Wu, 2021, p. 172).
The Three-Body Trilogy’s initial access to the dominant Western literary field was made possible by the state authorities’ economic capital, Ken Liu’s literary and symbolic capital, which gave The Three-Body Trilogy professional legitimacy in the American Sci-fi field, and the commercial operation of Tor Books, which transformed The Three-Body Trilogy from a political translation activity in the form of heterodoxy to a market-driven commercial publishing activity in the form of orthodoxy. This is evident in the early renewal of Tor Books’s rights to the English version of The Three-Body Trilogy. Tor Books renewed The Three-Body Trilogy’s English version rights for another $1.25 million in 2021, breaking the record for the highest overseas copyright output of Chinese literature and making author Cixin Liu one of five authors to receive more than a million dollars in advance royalties from Tor Books.
Conclusion
When examining the translation practice of The Three-Body Trilogy from the standpoint of field theory, it could be deemed that participants in various fields of translation activities, such as politics and literature, take part in the international dissemination and communication of literary and cultural works in their own ways. Translation is the primary means of circulating and disseminating world literature within the constraints of power in the hierarchical field of world literature, not just a simple translation between texts. In the field dominated by developed countries in Europe and the United States, The Three-Body Trilogy has realized the practice of overseas translation and dissemination through government-led literary translation projects like Classic China International Publishing Project and Silk Road Literary Project in the political field and entered the English world. In the European and American-dominated literary scene, The Three-Body Trilogy still requires a literary credential to gain further recognition and popularity. The accomplishments and reputation of Ken Liu, the translator, and Tor Books, the publisher, in the field of Sci-fi literature are a strong guarantee for the quality of The Three-Body Trilogy, which promotes its effortless international spread.
This study emphasizes the significance of social factors in literary translation and dissemination. The findings of this study demonstrate that, in the hierarchical world literary field, translation is no longer just a straightforward translation between texts but rather a significant medium for the dissemination of world literature within the boundaries of power. Based on the research presented in this study, it is challenging to promote a nation’s books abroad using only the internal competition mechanism of the book rights trade market when the nation’s language and culture are still not well-positioned. In turn, enforcing the external influence of government funding for translation and publication can shorten the translation and publication production cycle, which in turn permits dominated language books to emerge in the dominant language book market. Immigrants with solid bilingual skills and keen cultural perception can better coordinate the relationship between alienation and accessibility. When coordinating cultural relations and resolving cultural differences, they are better able to find innovative translation techniques, and with the help of logical cultural mediation, they can ensure the successful dissemination of cultural values.
A drawback of this study is that it only considers The Three-Body Trilogy in English and pays scant attention to habitus and capital, two other concepts from Bourdieu’s theory of social practice. Further research may: (a) interview the translator to obtain the most realistic information about the translator’s habitus, (b) explore the translator’s habitus with the help of paratext, such as the translator’s postscript, footnotes, and so on, and (c) analyse the capital support of the translation participants before the translation was produced and the capital feedback of the participants entailing the translation’s success.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Scientific Research Foundation for High-level Talents of Anhui University of Science and Technology “Research on the English Translation of The Three-Body Trilogy” (2024yjrc31).
Data Availability Statement
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.